Mendocino and Other Stories Page 9

  “I think tomorrow might be good,” Winch says. “Get there by Wednesday night.”

  “I feel terrible,” Sarah says.

  “Don't,” Winch says.

  “No,” Luke says, tightening his grip on her hand. “Don't.”

  THEY SAY GOOD NIGHT to Winch, promising to send him off with a big breakfast. Luke follows Sarah to their bedroom, his hands on her shoulders.

  “I do feel terrible,” she says, once the door's closed.

  “But not that terrible?” Luke says.

  She sits on the bed. “I never say things like that to people. I felt so strange afterward—too powerful.”

  “It's a lot easier being the victim,” Luke says. “Isn't it?” He takes off his sweatshirt and jeans and drapes them over a chair. He stretches, yawns. She's got a strange, intense look on her face—as if she were trying very hard to hear something in another room. “You know what?” he says, going over to the bed. “I'm not going to brush my teeth tonight.” He gets under the covers; she hasn't moved. “What do you think about that?”

  “Vile,” she says, standing up. “Disgraceful.”

  She goes over to the chair where his clothes are and starts picking them up. He's about to tell her that she shouldn't be putting his clothes away when he realizes she's not: she's getting hers out from under them. She shakes out her sweater, folds it, puts it in a drawer. Then she picks up her skirt and shakes it out, too.

  “Hey, is that new?” he says. “I like it.”

  She doesn't say anything for the longest time. She just looks at him. Then she gives him a peculiar smile. “Thanks,” she says.

  She hangs up the skirt, takes off her robe, and climbs into bed. “What do you suppose he'll do in Minneapolis?” she says.

  Luke thinks about it for a while. Over the years he's gotten dozens of postcards from Winch, and from the strangest places, but they never really say anything; they make jokes. The one announcing Winch's imminent arrival came from Texas and featured a man standing next to a giant replica of a ten-gallon cowboy hat. On the back Winch had written: “Everyone here's got a swelled head. I tried to get work ropin' cattle but the damn outfit didn't look good on me. Watch your front door.”

  “Maybe he has a girlfriend there,” Sarah says.

  “A port in every girl,” Luke says. Then, before she can respond: “Sorry.” He takes her hand.

  “I have a question,” she says. “Say—just say—you guys had decided to drop acid this weekend. Where would you have gotten it?”

  Luke loves that she said “drop”: it's so her. “Well, honey,” he says, “a man just knows a thing like that.”

  “Come on.”

  “I don't know,” he says. Then he remembers something Doug Kaiser told him the last time he was busted. “You know those sneakers you sometimes see hanging from power lines? They're supposed to mark dealers' houses. I guess we could've just knocked on doors until we got lucky.”

  “What?” Sarah says. “You're kidding. There's a pair outside our house. Jesus.”

  “Well,” Luke says. “It's not me. Is it you?” He rolls onto his side and brings his hand up to touch her hair. “I always had a funny feeling you weren't telling me something.”

  WINCH CAN'T SLEEP. For one thing, the couch is too short for him—he won't miss it. But he's also got agitation of the brain: he feels like he's just on the edge of understanding something important. He starts running through some of his more long-standing questions; but he still doesn't know why people in the South pretend to be so friendly when they're really not; or why so many women who sit next to him on busses act so cold for the first fifteen minutes and end up pressing legs with him for the better part of the trip; or why, when he gets picked up hitchhiking, guys in hats usually wind up angry at him for some reason. He still doesn't know why six months working outside somewhere is OK while six months indoors cooks his goose. Or why being really cold is kind of pleasant but being really hot is like being visited by a terrible illness. And he still doesn't know why his parents continue to send him money to go home for Christmas, or why he continues to go.

  He sits up on the couch, swinging his sleeping-bagged legs onto the coffee table. Thinking of Luke and Sarah, Winch decides that the next time he's in love he will pay closer attention. To make it last maybe all you've got to do is be super vigilant, stand there looking for the small, misleading shapes of problems that are destined to grow. Or maybe what you've got to do is turn your back on them: whistle past those graveyards.

  The plastic thing on the cord of his sleeping bag has worked its way into the small of his back. He twists out of the bag altogether and stands up. On tiptoe, he goes to the kitchen and fetches a beer. He waits until he's back in the living room to open it; then he pulls on his jeans and goes out to the porch. He sits on the top step. The cold beer and the wind on his bare chest feel just right. He looks up at the shoes dangling from the wire, and he's happy to find that he no longer really cares what they mean. If he were someone else he might take them as a signal: Walk. But he's going to walk anyway—just because he wants to.

  WHEN I ENTERED the ninth grade I had just turned fourteen and I wanted more than anything to be a pompon girl. My desire had formed over the course of the summer: my friends and I customarily ate lunch on the benches near the English office, but during the long idle months I had taken to imagining myself moved as if by magic to the picnic table in front of the snack machines, which was handed down, with all the arrogance and inevitability attached to the turning over of a monarchy, from one pompon squad to the next. Our school colors were red and yellow—crimson and gold, we called them—and by the end of the first day of school the idea of owning one of those short, flip-skirted red and yellow dresses had taken over my mind. The football season pompon girls had shown up in their new outfits, and I was enamored even of the spotless white Keds they wore. Tryouts for the basketball pompon squad weren't until the beginning of October, but within days I had cleared out our garage and claimed it as my practice area. I set up my record player on the shelf where my mother kept the tools, and I listened to all of my albums, over and over again, in an effort to find a song that would inspire me to make up a winning routine. The routine, according to the printed rules I got from the girls' P. E. office, would be composed of a series of “steps”—dance steps, I decided—of my devising. The only fundamental thing about pompon was pompon step itself, a kind of miniature running in place that would form the basis of everyone's routine. The rest was up to me.

  One Saturday morning, as I passed through the kitchen on my way to the garage, my mother cleared her throat and said she wanted to talk to me. She was sitting at the table, stacks of envelopes and her big, ledger-style checkbook lined up in front of her. She was paying the bills.

  She pulled her reading glasses down onto the tip of her nose and looked up at me. “Found a song yet?” she asked evenly.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  She nodded, and I wondered whether she was finally going to condemn my pompon dreams. So far, she hadn't come out against them—she hadn't, for instance, told me that she thought the whole concept was sexist or exploitative or elitist or even just plain silly—and because of her very neutrality I'd been assuming the worst. It wasn't like her not to comment.

  “I got a call last night from Jim Baranski,” she said, naming our down-the-street neighbor, who coached basketball at the local college. “One of his players needs a place to live and Jim thought we might let him have the guest room.”

  “Why would we do that?” I said.

  “That's what I asked Jim. I'm not looking to be anybody's frat mother.”

  “So that was that?”

  “The poor guy was supposed to have a full scholarship, but it fell through. If he can't find a place to live for free he's going to have to leave school. Jim says he's willing to do yardwork in exchange for a room.”

  “If we need yardwork done,” I said, “maybe we should just get a gardener.”

 
“We're not exactly rich at this point,” my mother said, her voice tight and controlled. She cleared her throat and went on in a friendlier tone. “Jim said it might be nice for Danny to have a guy around. You know, an older guy—someone he could do things with. Play basketball and stuff.”

  Now I understood; and I understood that she wasn't asking my opinion so much as pleading with me not to say no. My father had died a year earlier, a heart attack at forty-five, and my ten-year-old brother Danny had become a big source of worry to her. He spent all his time in his room, reading Planet of the Apes books and drawing highly detailed maps of outer space. The maps were really good: all the lines were meticulously drawn; the planets were colored in to look like real spheres; and everything was carefully labeled in his tiny, scientist's script.

  “When's he moving in?” I said.

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Well?”

  She began flipping through the bills. “I told Jim we'd try it for a month. And if any of us doesn't like it that'll be that.” She looked up at me, a small, desperate smile on her lips. “His name's Bobby. He's going to bring his things over tomorrow.”

  “OK.”

  “Really?”

  I forced a smile. “Sure,” I said. “It'll be good for Danny.” But I thought, A basketball player? It seemed like an insult to my father's memory: he had taught philosophy at the college, and his favorite and only sport had been speed-reading paperback mysteries.

  THE GUEST ROOM was right next to my room, and I got up early the next morning to take a last look at it. My room had been deco-rated—very decorated—according to my specifications six or seven years earlier; it was all pink and white, and whenever I felt the girlishness of it too keenly I would go into the guest room and lie on the bed in there. It was a big, square, airy room, full of plain oak furniture. The only adornment was an elaborate cut glass water pitcher on the dresser; anywhere else it might have looked gaudy, but it was the perfect touch in that austere room.

  I stood in the doorway and tried to imagine a college basketball player living next door to me. The room was empty except for when my grandmother came to visit, and although I could never really hear her, I always felt aware of her when she was there—of her breathing, of her sighing, of her rolling over in bed in the middle of the night.

  I went down to the garage and, as I had every day for the past two weeks, I worked on my pompon step. It wasn't, I had quickly learned, as easy as it looked. You had to jump from foot to foot, pointing first your left toes, then your right toes, then your left toes, then your right toes, and all the while you had to keep your hands at your waist, but not around your waist: they had to be bent at the knuckles so your fingers and thumbs wouldn't show. It was a little boring, but I didn't mind spending so much time on it because the next thing I had to do was settle on a song and start working on my routine. I knew it would have to involve some kicking, some little flips of the shoulder, and, most important, the splits, and although I'd been stretching every day I could only get down to about eight inches off the ground.

  Early in the afternoon, a car came up the driveway and stopped just on the other side of the garage. I turned off my music. A couple of doors slammed; then I heard a deep voice.

  “Nice deal, Bobby. Maybe they'll go away a lot and you can have some parties.”

  “Quiet.” His voice was clear and rather high for a man's. “They might be able to hear us.”

  I lowered the arm of the record player back onto the album I was playing, turned the volume up, and sat down on the garage floor, my bare legs touching the cold concrete. I listened to the muffled sounds of people going back and forth, from car to house, for the next five or ten minutes. After a while the commotion stopped, and I knew my mother and Danny were talking to Bobby and his friend. She had probably offered them iced tea, maybe even sandwiches. The only thing I had with me to read was the pompon tryouts instruction sheet, and I read it through several times, trying to concentrate on all the details—what kind of gloves you were supposed to wear, how long your routine should be, when the winners' names would be posted. There was one paragraph that I kept going back to. It said, “The pompon girls represent everyone at Murphy Junior High. They are our ambassadors to schools all over the county. Even when they're not in uniform they feel like pompon girls, and it's important that they look that way, too. This means extra special attention to personal hygiene and grooming. Any girl who doesn't know what this means should speak to Mrs. Donovan in the P.E. office as soon as possible.”

  I didn't know what it meant—I assumed it had something to do either with shaving under your arms or getting your period—but I wasn't about to ask Mrs. Donovan. With my mother I had only recently managed to shut down communication about such things; as far as I was concerned, we had covered what needed to be covered. The occasional appearance on my desk of pamphlets entitled “Your Changing Body” or “A Single Egg” suggested that she disagreed.

  Finally, I heard the car starting up again, and I turned the music off in time to hear the low-voiced guy say, “Later, bro.”

  “See you at practice,” Bobby said.

  They said a few more things, but in voices pitched so low I couldn't hear them. I imagined they were talking about me: saying how strange it was my mother hadn't made me say hello, that I must be one of those shy girls who couldn't look anybody in the eye. Either that, or they were wondering what I looked like, what color hair I had. What my body was like.

  AT SIX DANNY came out to tell me dinner was ready.

  “What are we having?” I asked.

  “Steak,” he said. “Baked potatoes with sour cream. Corn on the cob with butter. Chocolate cream pie.”

  He was joking. All we ever had now was fish. Sometimes she put a sauce called Mock Hollandaise on our vegetables, but usually it was just lemon juice and pepper. There was no salt in the house anymore, no butter.

  I laughed. “What'd you read today?”

  “I didn't really read.”

  I turned from him and began stacking my records together.

  “She invited him to eat with us,” he said.

  I didn't reply.

  “That guy. Bobby.”

  I wheeled around. “I know who you mean. What do you think I am, stupid?”

  His face turned a delicate shade of pink, the color he used to get when he had a fever. He was wearing a nerdy little plaid shirt with a too-big collar, and his head looked unbearably small to me.

  “I'm sorry, Dan,” I said. I took hold of his shoulders and pulled him to me. “You're almost as tall as I am, sonny-boy.”

  “Won't be long now, moony-girl.” He pulled away from me and I followed him into the house.

  BOBBY JOHANSEN WAS very tall: six foot four, I later learned. His hair was pale blond, almost colorless. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, wearing shorts, and I thought his legs would probably come up to my chest if we stood close.

  My mother was washing lettuce. “Here she is,” she said, as if my whereabouts had been a mystery. “Elizabeth, this is Bobby Johansen.”

  “Hi,” I said. The table was set for four, and my mother had even used cloth placemats; lately even the usual woven straw ones had gone missing more often than not.

  “Hey, Elizabeth,” he said. “How's it goin'?”

  I looked up at him and shrugged. “OK.”

  He didn't seem to know what to do with his hands. First they were on the counter behind him, then they were clasped in front of his fly, then crossed tightly over his chest. “What do you go by?” he said. “Liz? I've got a cousin Liz, just about your age.”

  “Elizabeth,” I said.

  “We used to call her Bit, though,” my mother said. “Didn't we, honey?”

  “We?” I said.

  She pursed her lips. “Danny did. He couldn't say Elizabeth, he said Elizabit. Then it was just Bit. Right, Dan?”

  “A few hundred years ago,” Danny said.

  “Well, anyway,” my mother said to me. “We
were thinking maybe after dinner the four of us could play a game. Monopoly or something.”

  “Can't,” I said. “Math test tomorrow.”

  My mother yanked a square of paper towel from the roll and began arranging the wet lettuce leaves on it.

  “I used to be pretty good at math,” Bobby said. “If you need any help.”

  “That's OK,” I said. It was in my mind to say, I'm pretty good at math, too; but I managed to stifle it. “Thanks, though.”

  There was a silence. I was still holding my records, so I went upstairs to put them in my room. The guest room door was ajar and I pushed it open. A couple of worn-looking green duffel bags were lying on the bed, with T-shirts and sweat clothes and towels spilling out as if they were someone's cast-offs at a garage sale. I tiptoed across the room and opened the closet door. It was empty except for three pairs of high-topped white leather sneakers arranged in a row on the floor. I bent over and picked up a shoe. It was longer than my forearm and it smelled: of dirty laundry and of sweat, but of something else, too—a sharp, leathery scent. It was, I decided, the smell of arrogance.

  THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, at the lunchtime rally that was the official end of the school day—during football season we got out early for away-games—I stood by myself and studied the football pompon girls' new routine. They would do it again at halftime later that afternoon, but I wasn't going to the game; none of my friends ever went, and I was too shy to go to an away-game alone. If I'd been asked why I wanted to go, I would only have been able to say that it had something to do with my father dying: that it wasn't the game so much as the way everyone looked after the game as they poured onto the field from the bleachers, uniform expressions of joy or despair on their faces.

  I rode my bicycle home through the college, thinking that I would have the house to myself for the afternoon. Students were lying on the grass in little groups, and I looked at them more carefully than usual, wondering if Bobby was among them. I hadn't seen him since the day he moved in. He had a meal plan at one of the dorms and he studied at the library, so all I knew of him so far was the sound of his footsteps on the stairs as I was falling asleep. He didn't even leave his toothbrush in the bathroom.